Winchester Funeral Cake Competition 2015

This year in Winchester we’ll be repeating our funeral cake competition, which was won by Natalie Buckingham of Buckinghams Cake Palace in Bournville last year.

As the Daily Mirror put it: Organisers are expecting a deluge of morbid meringues and the odd scone-but-not-forgotten.

We’re inviting visitors to the Ideal Death Show to bake a cake in memory of someone special. It will be on show during the exhibition and we’ll invite the best five to give us a short talk about what motivated them to create it.

We were originally inspired by Emma Freud’s advice in a Guardian article about putting together funerals. Everyone wants to be useful and helpful and they say things to the funeral organiser like: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do”

This can be frustrating for someone already overwhelmed with tasks.

Emma Freud’s stock answer is: “Could you please make a cake and bring it to the funeral tea?”

This means that “your funeral tea will be glorious, giving everyone lots of chances to say “Bernard would have adored the Battenberg”, and opportunities for quite a lot of Great British Bake Off-style banter. Also, you get left with enough cake to see you through the rest of that very difficult week.”

The scarab cake

This is the spirit of the competition and this year there will be a prize of a £100 meal for two for the best cake.

You may use non-edibles i.e. support structures, polystyrene dummies, wires, etc. The cake can be in any style, but we suggest that there should be a story associated with it about someone who has died. We’d like the cakes to be meaningful in some way.